Search Results for: childhood

As a boy Phil Benson tried to summon up an enthusiasm for baseball. He could see that his real passion, classical music, was considered somehow subversive – not really American. That is why Mr Tackett’s became such a haven for him. Away from the uninspiring pitch and the disapproving ear of his father at home, Phil found at his piano teacher’s a sanctuary for his musical conspiracy with the universe to flourish.

Katie Doheney was the victim of another sort of conspiracy – or so she was convinced from the first brush of her childhood logic with the real-life spectacle of death in a road accident and the image of the Hiroshima mushroom on television. The threat of nuclear holocaust stalked Katie’s every moment. Meanwhile Katie stalked Phil Benson.

By the time Phil was ready to go East and make everyone proud of him, no ordinary bond had grown up between Katie and himself. They understood each other’s obsessions. Phil’s keyboard was Katie’s bomb shelter and from Cuban missile crisis to the raid on Tripoli the curious duet played on.

Leigh Kennedy’s disarming and irresistible novel follows Katie into unlikely matrimony and Phil into the arms of a gun-toting St Louis actress. But that’s the least you would expect from two people who alone, as far as we know, have already been through World War Three.

When Marianne’s parents died, leaving control of their fortune to her feared older brother, she struggled to make her way as a student in America – and her old home began to seem as unreal as a fairy tale, her childhood there as distant as a dream . . .

Until the Magus came to claim her, and the Black Madame to destroy her, and the Manticore to hunt her down through the streets of another world – for there is magic in Marianne’s blood, and magic in her soul.

And in a battle fought in an everchanging world of warped time and wicked magic, it is the souls of Marianne and her family that are the ultimate prizes.

Marianne, the Matchbox and the Malachite Mouse is the final volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s acclaimed Marianne Trilogy.

When Marianne’s parents died, leaving control of their fortune to her feared older brother, she struggled to make her way as a student in America – and her old home began to seem as unreal as a fairy tale, her childhood there as distant as a dream . . .

Until the Magus came to claim her, and the Black Madame to destroy her, and the Manticore to hunt her down through the streets of another world – for there is magic in Marianne’s blood, and magic in her soul.

And in a battle fought in an everchanging world of warped time and wicked magic, it is the souls of Marianne and her family that are the ultimate prizes.

Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods is the second volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s acclaimed Marianne Trilogy.

When Marianne’s parents died, leaving control of their fortune to her feared older brother, she struggled to make her way as a student in America – and her old home began to seem as unreal as a fairy tale, her childhood there as distant as a dream . . .

Until the Magus came to claim her, and the Black Madame to destroy her, and the Manticore to hunt her down through the streets of another world – for there is magic in Marianne’s blood, and magic in her soul.

And in a battle fought in an everchanging world of warped time and wicked magic, it is the souls of Marianne and her family that are the ultimate prizes.

Marianne, the Magus and the Manticore is the first volume of Sheri S. Tepper’s acclaimed Marianne Trilogy.

Army psychiatrist Philip Outerbridge receives a confidential folder containing the letters, memos, and transcripts for a young soldier named George Smith – a quiet young man with a terrible past and a shocking secret. As Outerbridge conducts George’s therapy, he gradually discovers the truth about George’s traumatic childhood, his twisted romance with an older woman named Anna, and the unusual obsession George keeps hidden from the world.

Book four in the series which relate the story of Kirth Gersen as he exacts his revenge on five notorious criminals, collectively known as the Demon Princes, who carried his village off into slavery during his childhood.

It was a changed world. No longer did the black monks of the Christian Church own half of England and extend their deadly domain over their flock. No longer did the murderous Ragnarssons and their Viking hordes ravage the shires unopposed. Now, in the year 867 AD, those who wished to be Christian were free to worship without the heavy yoke of the ever-hungry Church. Those who did not could follow the Asgarth Way, the Norse religion that paid homage to the gods of Asgard: Othin, Thor, Frey…and Rig. Rig, the patron – perhaps the father? – of Shef Sigvarthsson. Whose new weapons and battle strategy had defeated both the battle-hardened Vikings and the Frankish knights of Pope Nicholas’ failed Crusade.

While enemies plotted, Shef left England by ship, to avoid the wedding of his ally, Alfred of Wessex, to his childhood love, Godive. Shipwrecked on the Frisian Coast he begins a journey that will keep him away from England for months and years, and add more legends to his already myth-shrouded life.

In One King’s Way Harry Harrison Continues the story of Shef Sigvarthsson, god-chosen warrior and mystic. From the Vikings of the North Sea to the scheming priests of Germany, from the frozen northern lands to the snow-covered Finnish tundra, he fights his way towards overwhelming kingship. While his supernatural allies and enemies engage in a shadowy battle for his future. This is historical fantasy of the highest order, from a giant of the genre.

Adapted by Fritz Leiber from the motion picture produced by Banner Productions, Inc., here is a Tarzan with the values of courage, loyalty and honour learned from the beloved of his wild African childhood, brought to full power by the education, intelligence and strength of his ancient Greystoke lineage.

For Poilar Crookleg, the Pilgrimage to Kosa Saag has been a lifelong dream. Each year twenty men and twenty women attempt to reach the Summit, converse with the gods, and return with new knowledge. A few Pilgrims return as madmen. Most are never seen again.

Poilar and his childhood friend Traiben are determined to survive the terrifying journey not as madmen but as teachers of wisdom. Traversing mysterious Kingdoms and blasted landscapes, braving ghosts and monstrous apparitions, they will arrive at the secret of the gods themselves – a secret that will shatter centuries of belief and change their world forever.

Originally published in 1958, under the pseudonym David Osborne.

Dr. Jeffrey Brewster, assistant professor of psycho-sociology at Columbia University, had been six weeks old when the first crude satellites were flung into space back in 1957. During his childhood there had been Moon rockets and the space stations – then the joint American-Russian-manned expedition to the Moon in 1965, right after the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship. Mars and Venus had been reached as he grew up and a permanent base was established on the Moon in 1973. Now the day’s papers reported that an expedition was ready to leave for Callisto, moon of Jupiter.

But Dr. Brewster had a class to make and he was late.

That was when the telephone rang and Mari, his wife, said, “Long distance from Washington.” The caller was Colonel Chasin of Unsecfor – United Nations Security Force, the global and international army that policed the world in these days of relative peace and harmony…

A daring novel of mankind’s strange and startling destiny. . .

Here is a novel to equal Arthur C. Clarke’s great work, Childhood’s End. It tells with frightening clarity of a desperately stricken Earth – wracked by overpopulation and plagued by famine and despair.

It tells, too, of a new breed of men and women – twenty-first century lotus eaters caught up in a mysterious euphoria which will ultimately threaten all life on this planet: the drug-induced world of ‘happy dreams’. Do these ‘happy dreamers’ herald the end of the human race – or the next extraordinary step in the evolution of Man?


First published in 1963.

The 22nd century, 150 years after the Dust War destroyed America’s Mid-West, and much else besides. California is a last outpost for survival and reclamation during a long epidemic of all-purpose despair.

The extraordinary cult of ‘Tumbonde,’ a former taxi driver its prophet and leader, predicts the imminent arrival on earth of ‘Gods’ from the stars. The movement grows daily.

Tom O’Bedlam, an apparent madman, prey since childhood to visions which seem to confirm ‘Tumbonde,’ goes even further. He can, he will, help others to make the Crossing. If the world doesn’t go too man too soon. If well-meaning ‘rationalists’ don’t lock him away . . .

The Nightingale was the most advanced craft in the entire fleet of Mercy ships belonging to the Gentle Order of St Francis Dionysos. On its maiden voyage, its life bays packed with refugees, the Nightingale disappeared. Despite strenuous efforts no trace of it could be found.

Then, a year later, a distress signal was heard and the Nightingale reappeared. It was damaged in ways that meant its survival in space was a miracle. But of its previous cargo of life-forms there was no sign. Only one creature remained alive within the ship, and that was its captain, Jon Wilberfoss.

Wulfsyarn is the story of the Nightingale, and of Jon Wilberfoss. It is told by Wulf, an autoscribe who has the task of observing Wilberfoss in the aftermath of his return. For the captain of the Nightingale is a condemned man: condemned by the Gentle Order, and self-condemned by a burden of guilt so intense his mind refuses to acknowledge it. Over the long period of Wilberfoss’ tortured convalescence in a peaceful monastery garden on the planet Tallin, Wulf watches and waits, recording the mosaic of Wilberfoss’ life: his childhood and adolescence, his entry into the Gentle Order, his marriage (to a native Tallin woman), and the great moment when he was chosen as captain of the Nightingale.

But can Wulf bring Wilberfoss to finally face the truth of what happened on the Nightingale’s fatal first and last journey?